


Pick a Star on the Dark Horizon

by faxingberlin (wherehaveallthecowboysgone)



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, lion jesus has the potential to not be a dickhead, nylons and lipsticks and invitations, trans Susan, trans woman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-07
Updated: 2014-02-07
Packaged: 2018-01-11 13:16:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1173499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wherehaveallthecowboysgone/pseuds/faxingberlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[trans woman Susan] Susan Pevensie wears armour made up of nylons and her battle cry is flung out into the world from between expertly applied lipstick.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pick a Star on the Dark Horizon

CONTENT WARNING: transmisogyny, violence (vaguely described), negativity, dysphoria

* * *

 

When the battles are fought and the peace is begun, Aslan draws her over.

Susan trembles a little. She waits for the judgement which she has been expecting. Her hands twist nervously behind her back, sweaty and cold, but her expression is serene. Still, she isn’t sure who she’s performing for. Here, of all places, is acceptance, but she’s been acting too long to let it go.

Together they slip away from the others, unnoticed. Aslan moves closer, and his rank breath washes over her. She is always forgetting that, first and foremost, he is a wild creature. Looking into his golden face shows only distant wisdom incomprehensible to the human mind—but that judgement she fears never comes. “Susan, compassionate woman,” he says, and she shivers. It ripples through her viscerally, leaving after-tremors. Woman. Her sister is a girlish tearaway just as she’s poised and so lovingly femme but—Woman. No qualifiers, no unsure tone, no glance flicker-flicker up and down and the look that says, really?

“Narnia has been done a great service this day. You stand, once more, amongst its saviours. Your duty is fulfilled. It is time for you to return to your own world.” There’s roaring in her ears, nearly drowning out his words. “This is the end of your journey here,” he says. Gentle. Implacable. Susan opens her mouth to protest. The one place she’s been entirely accepted with no conditions—no. No, she won’t accept never coming back. Here is where she belongs.

One look from Aslan quells her rage and fear. In the depths of those ancient eyes, she sees so much love that it seems extraordinary the cosmos can contain it.

“If you believe that you are less than other people–that you are unworthy–that those who love you are settling, or tolerating, or deserve your apology–that those you love are not lucky to have your love–your community has failed you,” he tells her. Susan is frozen to the spot. “If you or the people around you are using words that make you feel like a thing; if you talk about yourself like a disease, not a person; if you see nothing ahead in your old age but the bleakness of despair, isolation, and abuse; if your youth is a never ending desperation to get out and away to somewhere you cannot trust exists; if you are telling yourself it is excusable for other people, even loved ones, not to afford you the basic respect of your own name; if you are believing this is the best you can do, they have let you down.

“You deserve better. You are not broken. You are not worthless. You are not a problem and you are not a mistake*.” Aslan’s shaggy head comes in closer, and his mane brushes across her face. Burning so hotly that she can barely breathe, Susan runs her hands through it and clings on tightly.

“Welcome to church,” he whispers, voice rumbling through her like a rebirth.

* * *

There seems to be no time between the dull thud of hands slamming against her right shoulder and the sharp pain of her left scraping across the road. Susan’s eyes are open wide, unseeing. All that echoes in her ears is her own gasping breath. In the distance, they’re shouting at her. She knows this in the same way that this planet is Earth, in the vastness of space—but it has no bearing on where she is, who she is at this moment in time.

Susan aches. Her left shoulder is on fire.

When they shout, they don’t call her by her name. They say something else.

Susan burns hotter and brighter. Her beautiful new skirt—months of skulking past the shop-front and trying to work up the courage to go in and buy it, eventually dragging Lucy with her; she’s always more assured, almost bossy, in the presence of her siblings—ground into the dust.

Susan closes her eyes, squeezes them until she sees spots. The fury builds in her chest. If you knew, it comes to her, a tiny whisper managing to drown out the roaring in her ears. If you knew who I was. If you knew who I am, she thinks, sucking in air until her lungs feel as if they’ll burst.

She slams her right hand down, curling her fist around the gravel. They recoil back. Fear and adrenaline course through her, but she remembers—she still remembers being Queen Susan, beloved—  
If she could, Susan would push time forward with the strength of her own will, zip past all these school days and the pain until she was an adult and hold herself there forever, to be Queen Susan again, who could have called up an army to defend herself.

A sob threatens to break free, and she drowns it with the power of practice. Not here. Later. With Lucy, who understands.

They see her tremble, and the spell of her anger is broken. Breaking into a shambling run, they come for her—but Susan is quick with adrenaline and soon outruns them. She holds onto the fact that she managed to show some small defiance that didn’t cause more pain: a stand she was able to make, and might be able to again. And, so vital for her, she’s running home to a warm embrace and kind words.

It’s not linear, it’s not neat. There are some days when so much pain is packed into her fragile body that she’s quite insensible to the possibility of her existence. The faith she carries within her can wither in the face of that much suffering. She rails against Aslan for sending her back to a world that hates her; cries, shouts, throws herself on the floor and lies there for hours without moving anything but to breathe.

Someone will find her. Distant from those days when her siblings would hear those noises of despair and disappear, now they come to her. They give her the name she chose, acknowledge the person that she is. A cool hand will be pressed against her hot brow. A glass of water will be pushed towards her, and a quiet, expectant body wait beside her. Not always. But nowadays, more often than not.

This is church. This is Susan’s republic of heaven.

Lucy prefers to ride out her storms in private. People surrounding her is the last thing on her mind. Her republic of heaven is not being poked at, pried at, levered open to be placed on display every day as some sort of monster. Susan wants to sparkle safely out in the sun; Lucy would rather live quietly, privately, for herself. Too many knocks have been dealt to a trusting child. This world isn’t Narnia, where they’d be in their own power. People like them go missing regularly. They’re spectacles, show pieces: laughable, damnable, fit for the graveyard. They don’t live on.

But within their cherished circle, they simply are.

Welcome to church.

* * *

Susan stares at her reflection in the mirror, and manages to summon a smile. It comes surprisingly ready and, much to her surprise, a laugh escapes before she can catch it and crush it close to her heart—because happiness doesn’t last, it’s too much to hope, it’s too much to have dreams for the future.

But it’s gone, floating off, and Susan looks at herself again. That person moves when she does, breathes when she does. Tracing the outline of that face, she can nearly believe that she has enough presence to cast a reflection.

Build the republic of heaven.

Sweet, ferocious, lioness Lucy, gone. Sometimes, when nobody else was around, Lucy would knock on her door. They’d sit there for hours as Lucy consented for Susan to decorate her with the contents of those wonderful bags. No words. Only for a few, magical hours. The warm feeling in Susan’s chest has been hollowed out and replaced with grief.

Peter and Edmund: bossy, silly, accepting. Gone. So puzzled when she told them, such progress when they wanted to understand. That quiet respect, maturing relationship soured by one discordant note: denial of Narnia. Lucy clung to it as her strength. During the violent years of her adolescence, forged in fire, Susan had still held onto Narnia. The years passed, and Susan let those broken pieces of the dream go. As long as she held them to her chest, she only made the cracked edges of her heart bleed. Staring into the kingdom of heaven and knowing the only way to reach it was one that… she struggled so fiercely against, she entered the hall of the imperfect, possible republic of heaven.

The person in the mirror is a woman in a way which has never been done before and never will be again. There is Susan who has been a queen and is now herself. Wrapped tightly within layers of socialisation and lies and confusion, she is undoing the knots of who they said she was and fighting through to find herself.

Susan wanders through the wilderness of her body. Sometimes what she finds only leaves her desolate. This world isn’t how it should be, she knows. Her heart and her emotions are strangers. Chasing after them is a daily ritual, trying to cup her own happiness in her desperate hands and hold it up to her mouth, drinking, drinking until she’s finally satisfied. Narnia opened the floodgates and now Susan is swamped by the enormous, terrifying potential of the universe being able to love her.

Finding joy kept her going. She discovered nylons—nylons! Beautiful, elegant, hours dancing around her room and everyone telling her how flattering they were—lipsticks!—in all the colours of the rainbow, a lipstick for every mood and every caprice, saving up money and staring longingly into shop windows, counting the coins in her hands and counting down the days til she’d hold that tube to her lips—and invitations.

People who treasure her: not as Queen Susan, who she has gently, tenderly, laid to rest. She set aside that person as if she was a cherished dress, still loved too much to throw out entirely. Queen Susan was another person entirely. That woman flourished in a place that loved her without limits.

Susan Pevensie wears armour made up of nylons and her battle cry is flung out into the world from between expertly applied lipstick. Behind her is not an army of Narnians but a small, dedicated line of friends and partners who link hands like chains and will hold her when she crumples under the weight of the hostile world. She grieves for the fact that what she has, so many will not know. They deserve better. They are not the problem.

The republic of heaven is possible. Susan holds that close on the days when dysphoria hits her so strongly that she can barely bear to look at herself, when she’d gladly strip off her skin and hold it up for the others to flay. The republic of heaven will never be built, not entirely, not in this time; some days, it’s enough to know that some people love her as much as the Narnians did—but she can keep them as she couldn’t keep the Narnians. Some days it isn’t.

Today it is. Welcome to church.

**Author's Note:**

> *[quote, slightly adapted, from little light’s http://life-in-neon.tumblr.com/post/41142640372/clamavi-ad-te-little-light tw: murder, suicide, rape, violence]
> 
> The writer of the piece said the word church didn't convey Catholicism or Orthodox or Anglican. Something that goes much further and deeper than 'the Church'. Sanctuary, community. Chosen people. Welcome to your church, where you're loved, safe and accepted. It goes with Pullman's idea of the republic of heaven over the kingdom of heaven; creating spaces that subvert oppressive, repressive dogma.


End file.
